Jamil Miller is not yet 22, and yet he’s already experienced a lifetime of adversity. He grew up in Camden without his father, and when he was in high school his mother was incarcerated. With extraordinary support from his teachers, Jamil graduated from Brimm Medical Arts High School and enrolled in Rowan University.

College wasn’t exactly Easy Street — Jamil was unexpectedly left without a place to live during his freshman year, and he had to work throughout college to make ends meet.

Through all of that, Jamil is spending his summer interning at Cooper University Hospital, and next school year Jamil will graduate from Rowan and continue his education at medical school, from where he plans to become a cardiologist.

I believe Jamil’s story is Camden’s story — one of deep challenges, to be sure, but also one of support, and one of hard-earned success.

I first met Jamil in January at an event to announce our latest graduation rate, which is now 64 percent, up from 49 percent when I was appointed three years ago. And that’s also part of Camden’s story — progress and a long way still to go.

This school year, our students, staff and families continued to make strides. Teachers reported feeling better supported, and students reported feeling safer. Families were happier with their children’s schools and the direction the schools were moving.

Additional improvements include reducing the time that students take tests, and increasing educators’ capacity to use students’ results to guide their instruction; building on bright spots, such as early childhood education, and connecting that work to our elementary education; and providing opportunities for older students, like freshmen and sophomores in high school, to take twice as much math and literacy instruction in order to make sure they’re prepared for their next step after graduation.

Of course, we have a great deal of work still to do before all of our students are receiving the excellent education they deserve.

Next year, we will be rolling out improvements to our curriculum, and we will introduce new ways to explore and begin to address some of the deep, systemic challenges — borne out of poverty — that our students and families face every day.

CLOSE

Vedra Chandler toured with Broadway shows and performed with Cirque du Soleil. Here, she performs with other members of CamdenpopRock! at the Victor Lofts in Camden as part of Camden's 3rd Thursday Art Crawl.
Chris LaChall/Staff Photographer

We will also introduce new positions, like reading interventionists and family and operations coordinators, to increase literacy levels and family engagement.

All of our efforts are intended to create conditions where more students can thrive, where more students can be like Jamil. The obstacles are steep — the college completion rate for low-income minority students nationally is 9 percent for a reason. These students face immense barriers, many of which are the product of institutional racism, which begat poverty, which begat conditions that led to dramatically underperforming schools.

But getting a high-quality education should be our students’ birthright, not something left to the odds of a scratch-off lottery ticket.

So as these students head off to their next step — to play college sports, to serve in the military, to develop advance knowledge in a skilled trade — we salute them and their families, friends and support systems. We’re immensely proud of their accomplishments, and we will honor their achievements by continuing to do everything we can to make sure that the students behind them can follow in their footsteps.